Phil Collins - One More Night

And another one. I'm feeding my malancholy. Effectively.

Phil Collins - Can't stop loving you

My song for today.

Circular motion

Here I am. I did it again. And I really thought that this time was going to be different. I have come a full circle, just like most of the summers before. No matter how much of America I have absorbed, inhaled, adopted and incorporated in my life, it is enough to spend a couple of months in Poland to realize how easily I can let it all go... Of course, there would be things and people and experiences that I would miss, I am hardly impervious to what the world offers me, but still, the very core of me lies here and as much as it makes my life more difficult I would not give it away. It makes me... me.
I see now that spending my summers in Poland may play a bigger role in my life than I would have thought. Being here is not only for my sons - to have a real summer, to reconnect with their family, to make their Polish stronger, to have an idea where their parents come from and how life can be different from what they experience in NYC.... it is also for me to distance myself from who I become in NYC and decide what I like about it and what, well, I don't necessarily need. My summers here have not always been exactly how they are supposed to be but most of them (with one big exception, but that does not prove or disprove anything, I think) have given me a step back perspective on my life, helped connect 'me' from the past with 'me' in the present. The clash that sometimes occurs at such an encounter may be painful but keeps me real, gives me roots and does not let me float away to some place that would make me so very uncomfortable after a while.
This is my circle - learning every summer again how very Polish I am after all and how difficult it is to leave this place every time, how it hurts to cross this distance again... I have come such a long way in every dimension and I have swum against the current for so long, learning how to place my feet on that foreign land across the Atlantic day after day, sometimes forcing myself to do one after another new thing, trying not to get lost in all of this and wondering how on earth I find the strength to make myself do these things and why I think I need them and if I really need them... I still have not found a place in my American life where I can truly relax, where I can let go and just be me, no more, no less. I have such places here, places where I feel, smell, taste the sense of the words "my little piece of the world." I forget about this feeling after several weeks in NYC, I forget because if I did not I would never be able to live there.
I know it is crazy to go through all of this every year but without this I would probably be a very different person now and somehow I believe I wouldn't like her very much... Yes, it makes me feel confused and yes, it wrecks my emotional stability (which is never in a very good condition anyway...), but you know what... I'll live. And I will use it because I will not let any pot to melt me, ever. Sorry.

A note to family and friends:

And don't you love me precisely because of that (among other things, of course)?!

P.S. When I picture myself at the Graduate Center in Manhattan in just five days in my Syntax class, I can only laugh now. It feels like such a huge incongruity. But the funniest part is that I can do it, I can be there and behave as if it were the most normal thing on earth... while my mind will be somewhere else. And after it ends I will run home and I may even cry, who knows. Maybe I'll cry already on the subway. But who cares, New Yorkers have seen the oddest things and it is said they do not get impressed easily. Fortunately, I know a few who do care. Even if the things that happen to me may be foreign to them.

Sun, peaches, flowers and obsessiveness.

Around noon the Sun was one third less... A partial solar eclipse. Definitely not as exciting as it used to be to people but still reminds us (at least it does to me) that we are only little specks of matter in a huge universe. I cannot believe we spend most of our lives as blind as ants marching in circles around their anthill. Tending to our little tiny problems, carefully constructing our miniscule plans, and putting amazing amounts of arduous work into our miniature projects. Ants work together, their survival depends on it. People seem to work hard on isolating, fracturing, and promoting everything that would make an individual self-suficient. We call it nicely being independent, strong, carrying your own weight, reaching your full potential... and these are all truly virtuous ideas but often we take it too far, as it is quite common for human race to engage in excess. What happens then? We become simply egocentric, concentrated so much on our own self that we cannot even pretend we are interested in what other people do, think, or feel. And even if we are interested it is only when we can get something out of it. There are many different roads to this destination. Sometimes it seems you have no other choice. Sometimes you can become your own 'family-centric' and see any outside input as potentially damaging, hostile, or just offensive. Why should you let anybody ruin what you have worked so long to build? I started thinking here about people and situations I know but many of them are so complex that I won't even try to understand the reasons, sources, products... The line between being a strong, decisive, mentally integrated person and an opinionated egocentric is sometimes as thin as the one between people who simply like to have some control over the world around them and the ones suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder.

On the brighter note, I spent the whole afternoon and evening walking barefoot in my mom's garden, playing with my kids, eating ice cream and peaches (straight from the tree and warm from the sun) and I even did some gardening, the last of which I found surprisingly relaxing. I discovered that when you work in the garden you literally stop thinking... What a refreshing change! It felt so good I could get addicted. I mean, you do think but it's different than what thinking usually feels like. I was thinking in images, saw in my head the things I was doing and mostly just manipulated it. I don't know if it's like this for everybody but I guess there must be something in it - so many people enjoy gardening. I don't know how often I could do it but it would come in handy from time to time. Everybody needs a break.

Yes! I managed to stop writing about negative revelations of mine and finish my post with a 'bees and flowers' kind of thing. I'm so PROUD of myself. Sigh.